It was on a very cold day of the cold spring of 1879 that three ladies descended at the Liverpool station, escorted by a military-looking gentleman. He left them standing while he made inquiries, but his servant had anticipated him. “The steamer has been signalled, my Lord. It will be in about four o’clock.”
“There will be time to go to the hotel and secure rooms,” said one lady.
“Oh, Reeves can do that. Pray let us come down to the docks and see them come in.”
No answer till all four were seated in a fly, rattling through the street, but on the repetition of “Are we going to the docks?” his Lordship, with a resolute twirl of his long, light moustache, replied, “No, Sydney. If you think I am going to have you making a scene on deck, falling on your husband’s breast, and all that sort of thing, you are much mistaken! I shall lodge you all quietly in the hotel, and you may wait there, while I go down with Reeves, and receive them like a rational being.”
“Really, Cecil, that’s too bad. He let me come on board!”
“Do you think I should have brought you here if I had thought you meant to make yourself ridiculous?”
“It is of no use, Sydney,” said Babie; “there’s no dealing with the stern and staid pere de famille. I wonder what he would have liked Essie to do, if he had had to go and leave her for nearly two months when he had only been married a week?”
“Essie is quite a different thing—I mean she has sense and self-possession.”
“Mamma, won’t you speak for us?” implored Sydney. “I did behave so well when he went! Nobody would have guessed we hadn’t been married fifty years.”
“Still I think Cecil is quite right, and that it may be better for them all to manage the landing quietly.”